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Is your cell phone battery losing power constantly? Have you ever had to stop using your cell phone in the middle of a call because the battery died? Here are a few tips you can use to conserve your cell phone battery's power:

* If you know you're traveling to an area without coverage or with only spotty roaming coverage, consider turning off your cell phone. Your phone can use a lot of power trying to find a suitable network, although some phones may stop polling after a while to try to reduce this battery hoggishness. One other option if you need to use your calendar, notes, play Angry Birds, etc. is to put the phone in "airplane mode" where all communications are stopped yet local apps should still be usable....

For playing online games or accessing particular Internet services, it might prove useful to know your public IP address (the address that other computers / devices on the Internet can use to contact your machine and the address given out when contacting other computers / devices). If you are using an ISP (Internet Service Provider) that provides dynamic IP addresses, this may change every time you go online. And, if you use a proxy server or VPN (virtual private network), displaying your "public" IP address can help ensure you are actually accessing the Internet via the connected service.

Instead of going through computer settings to display your public IP address, finding this information is just a Google search away:...

As Windows 8.1 has adopted a flatter interface, gradients and drop shadows have been removed from a variety of places including the mouse pointer. If you feel that the mouse pointer drop shadow helps make it easier to spot on the Desktop, do the following:

1. Access the "Mouse" Control Panel. One way to do this is by pressing Windows + R, entering main.cpl and pressing Enter....

TreeSize Free for Windows can help you determine what is taking all your hard drive space by displaying a directory tree. After selecting a drive or folder for scanning by running the application or selecting TreeSize Free from a folder's right-click menu, you can change options such as displaying a folder's size, allocated space, usage percent, or file count. File size can be reported in gigabytes, megabytes, kilobytes, or a combination ("automatic units").

Other features include sorting files and folders by name or size, showing details of each subdirectory inside a directory tree, and performing filters so only certain paths or files are visible. A report can be printed from the results. Options include forcing the application to only use one thread (if you are performing other CPU-intensive tasks simultaneously), displaying or not displaying compressed files and folders in blue, and choosing the gradient colors used in the background of each folder to represent disk usage....

Do you often need to communicate with co-workers, extended family, or friends that live across the country or world? Stop waking them up at odd hours of the night or sending them an electronic mail or Skype request by not knowing their local time zone.

Two additional time zones can be added to the Windows 8.1 Desktop Taskbar, accessible by hovering over the clock. Clicking on the clock can display larger clocks of each configured time zone....

Do you want to enjoy loose-leaf tea that is the "best thing since the invention of fire"? Looking to buy a beard wash for a beard that has people thinking "that dude probably builds radical decks and sturdy fences to keep wolves and bears out"? Or are you looking for a new laptop that "can be used as [a] homeplate for a local little league baseball game provided the umpire has completed the proper training"?

Reviews for these and other products are available at UHPinions, a website that grabs reviews from sites such as Amazon and Yelp, displaying them for your amusement. Reviews are divided into categories such as "cars and motorsports", "electronics", and "hotels and travel", plus you can browse "best", "favorite", or random reviews. And if you find an interesting review not already online, you're free (and encouraged) to submit it....

Let's say you are copying files between different folders on your Windows 8.1 system or networked drives, or perhaps you are performing basic file maintenance. The need comes to work with two different folders that end with the same name in the path. Another task distracts you, and now you need to get back to work on a particular folder. If you hover your mouse pointer over "File Explorer" in the Taskbar, only the ending parts of the paths are readable. You'll have to manually click on each window to find out what path each thumbnail represents.

What if you could make the folder windows contain the full paths, such as "C:\Windows.old\Windows\Cursors", instead of just "Cursors"? This is an easy tweak....

Do you frequently share content on a variety of blogs, bookmarking services, and social networks, as well as via web-based e-mail, using sites such as Facebook, Gmail, Pinterest, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Twitter? Tired of installing extensions for each individual service to share content or relying on website share buttons?

The "AddThis - Share & Bookmark" extension for Google Chrome adds a button to the Toolbar that lets you share content via, according to the author, over 300 services. These include the aforementioned as well as AOL Mail, Blogmarks, Digg, Evernote, LinkedIn, Plurk, Xing, and many, many more....

Just as with Windows 7, when you hover over Taskbar icons, previews of open windows appear. These don't normally snap onscreen but fade in and out of view, and if you move between Taskbar icons the previews become animated.

If you don't care for the Windows 8,1 Taskbar animations and would rather save time by disabling them, the following tweak does so:...

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The MalekTips website was created in 1998 by
Andrew Malek of
Envision Programming. The page's goal is to freely disperse
computer-related tips, hints, and informative articles.
Tips are organized to be easy to find, and are presented
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